Facebook has worms - are you at risk?

Social networking sites under attack - 'Koobface' is out to get you

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Worms 'contained' says Facebook

Facebook has been under attack in recent days from spammers in search of information that will help them commit ID fraud. Some members claimed that their accounts had been deactivated or hijacked, while much more spam was received than usual. One source suggests that abuse from malware was higher in the last month than all of 2007.

As TechRadar reported yesterday, the social networking site has now got over 100 million account holders ('users' implies action, which probably applies more to its minority hardcore). Many of these attacks have been variants of a worm called Koobface, which has been slithering around the cyberguts of both Facebook and MySpace since late July. Facebook reckons everything is now under control.

Worm detected

A statement on the Facebook site related that: "Over the past few days, we have received reports from users of spam and phishing attacks. We have also detected and contained a worm. We are investigating every report, removing false content, blocking bogus links and addressing the concerns of our users. These efforts have limited the affected users to a small percentage of those on Facebook."

Along with taking one spammer to court, the company has updated its security page accordingly in response to the 27 recently identified variants of Koobface. The worms work by masquerading as messages from friends that are then opened by unsuspecting users.